Every year, I pray that I will have outgrown my allergies. I've heard that this can happen if you build up enough resistance over time.

Every year, I am disappointed. Two seconds after imagining a blissful allergy-free spring, I start scratching at my doctor's office door, begging for medication.

I am allergic to so many things that I love. I try to convince myself that I can overcome these allergies, but it is rarely easy to control—or even temper—an involuntary physiological reaction. When I was a baby, I cried constantly and couldn't eat anything my mother tried to feed me—not breast milk, not goat's milk, not even lamb-based formula. Soy milk made me break out in such massive blisters that my mother and doctor thought I would be scarred for life. Ironically, I immediately stopped crying when the blisters emerged, as if my relief came only when my pain was brought to the surface.

When I was four years old, I ate my first strawberry and instantly fell in love with the taste. I quickly ate another, and another, and another. I ate so many strawberries that I broke out in hives. My mother, having a flashback to the blisters of my infancy, pronounced strawberries totally off-limits to me from then on. I didn't question this "allergy" until I was in high school, when I accidentally ate something that contained strawberries and was amazed that I didn't die. Maybe I was never allergic to strawberries; maybe it was just a one-time reaction to a severe overdose. Or maybe I outgrew this particular allergy. I'll never know.

Some allergies are genetic; some emerge during our lives. One of my ex-girlfriends, Stasia, developed an extreme nut allergy as an infant. It took months for her family to discover that her Ukrainian grandmother, thinking that nuts made people smart, was grinding nuts into all her baby food. Stasia's allergy grew more severe with each bad reaction she had. By the time I met her, she was sensitive to even the slightest smell of nuts and didn't go anywhere without an Epipen and a pack of Benadryl.

As it turns out, if you are exposed to too much of anything, that substance can become toxic to your system, regardless of how old you are or what your previous medical history has been. Allow me to expand the definition of "allergy" to "something that triggers an involuntary, dangerous reaction." According to this description, I am allergic to Stasia. She was my first love. I thought she was the love of my life. We both said it was forever. We lived together, exchanged rings, shared a dog. But there are no guarantees in life. We cannot predict when we will suddenly develop allergies or when those allergies will unexpectedly disappear. We cannot know which ones may lie dormant for years, waiting for the right time to reappear.

I met Stasia when I was eighteen. We were in the same freshman seminar in college. I immediately didn't like her; she was too carefree and laughed too much. She wore red Converse sneakers, had short hair, and sat in the back of the classroom with people that didn't seem to take their schoolwork very seriously.

I, on the other hand, took schoolwork—and everything else—very seriously. I had a 4.0 grade point average. I curled my hair every morning. I sang in the church choir on Sunday evenings. I was on the Orientation Committee, Parents' Weekend Committee, and even headed a committee of the Student Advisory Board. I dated the president of the Student Government. In the privacy of my dorm room, I wrote horrendously bad poetry and angst-ridden musical compositions.

Stasia and I were both music majors. The music department loved her from the outset. She was an exceptional pianist and won an award in our first year that music students traditionally weren't eligible for until junior year. Still, she didn't seem to know—or care—how good she was. When Stasia went abroad during her junior year, she sent the music department pictures and postcards of her experiences in Vienna. These missives were prominently displayed on the department's bulletin board during her absence. When she came back senior year, Stasia was a mini-celebrity, at least in my mind. I was even more determined not to like her.

I had won the junior year music award the previous spring and was required to sing at a concert in the beginning of my senior year to prove I was worthy of the prize. My advisor suggested that I ask Stasia to accompany me. To my surprise, Stasia accepted. One evening when we were practicing, she suddenly stopped playing.

"Do I make you nervous?" she asked.

I was startled to realize that she did. "No, of course not."

From then on, we were inseparable. We had several classes in common and spent a lot of time outside of class studying together. Stasia was writing her honors thesis on Arvo Pärt and wanted me to hear some of his music. Her boyfriend had a good sound system, so one night we hijacked his room, turned off the lights, and sat on his bed, side by side, listening to the Te Deum. We did not touch. Our fingers did not even brush. I do not have a word to describe what I felt that night. Arousal doesn't even come close.

I went to sleep that night trying to figure out what had happened in that room, trying to understand what I was feeling. The next night, Stasia and I went to see a production of one-acts written by theatre students; I had written incidental music for one of the plays. After the performances, Stasia awkwardly tried to tell me how she had felt the previous night. I didn't understand what she was saying. I stared blankly at her as she stumbled over words and talked around her point. I just shrugged and said, "I don't know what you're talking about."

The following night, I invited her to my room to study. She told me that she was surprised to hear from me. "I didn't think you would talk to me after what I said last night." I didn't answer her. Two hours later, our knees touched. Another hour later, her hand was casually on my knee. Around three in the morning, we kissed.

Just as when I ate my first strawberry, I overindulged on Stasia. I spent my entire Thanksgiving counting the seconds until I could see her again. I got drunk at the winter ball and told my friends about our relationship. It was a testimony to the blinders I wore that I thought they didn't already know. I spent my Christmas vacation writing letters to Stasia and running up huge phone bills. Spring semester, I spent every free minute I had with her, forsaking all other friendships. I felt out of control for the first time in my life.

After graduation, I moved to Tennessee to start a graduate program in mathematics, and Stasia moved to New York to study ethnomusicology. It became clear to me very early on that I was not destined to finish this degree program. After one semester of misery, I gave up on my five-year plan. I left Vanderbilt and moved to New York City to live with Stasia, with no job, very little money, and a vague notion of applying to Teach For America for the next school year.

Living in New York stripped away any remaining illusion that I had control over my life. I interned with Teach For America for a few months before I started teaching, at which point I truly learned what it felt like to have no control in my life. My classroom was sheer pandemonium; very few students listened to me, much less learned from me. I came home every day crying. Furthermore, as a new teacher, I netted about $800 every two weeks. Stasia's fellowship paid her less than $15,000 a year. While Stasia never seemed confined by our limited funds, I was. After I bounced a rent check, I imposed drastic limitations to make sure we lived within our means. One day, I suggested—insisted—we walk eighty blocks home from Herald Square because I couldn't justify wasting $3 on subway fare. I restricted our monthly grocery spending to $150 and decided that we could only take showers every other day because hot water was too expensive. Stasia humored my frugality most of the time, but she also knew when it was important to spend money. She somehow found a way for us to see shows at the Met, and she brought home roses and my favorite candy when I had a hard week. I edited her master's thesis; she edited my outlook on life.

It seemed to me that we were happy in our invented world on Claremont Avenue. We took our dog for long walks. We had dinner every weekend with her parents. It wasn't always sunshine and roses, but two months before she left, I wrote about our relationship: "Life has been breathed back into the hibernating ones/We have shed our winter clothing/and the fears and coldness of heart that barely keep us alive/and although it has taken awhile for spring to come this year for you for us/the warmth will come very soon...after all, Nature is meant to resurrect itself every year/not to live exactly as before/but to breathe new air/to feel new earth at our feet/to face the wind/its silky texture running through us."

My parents knew about my relationship with Stasia. They weren't happy about it, but they were content to consider Stasia a phase that I was going through, and I was content with their tolerance for the time being. However, Stasia had never come out to her parents, and they continued to believe that she and I were just really good friends. One day, this changed. During a therapy session, Stasia's sister told her psychologist about our relationship, and the psychologist in turn shared the news with Stasia's parents. We were woken up at 2 a.m. by a call from her mother, who whipped out the classic, "If you stay with that girl, you are dead to me" line.

Within a month, Stasia was gone.

She left me with a half-empty apartment and a completely empty heart, with questions that would remain unanswered for years, and with a new allergy: her. In the face of losing any semblance of control over my life, my involuntary reaction was to abandon all sense of reason and sanity. I did everything I could think to get her back, things that still pain me. I screamed; I begged; I lied; I threatened to hurt myself; I threatened to hurt her. Stasia responded to my crazed behavior by walking away and not looking back.

I moved out of New York City and resolved to never get in touch with her again. I didn't return her Christmas cards and yearly e-mails. Every time I saw her name, I would cry, be angry, or fall into a depression. It took me years to build up the resistance to the pollen that Stasia had left behind. Even now, I am not positive that I will ever fully get over her. I have had relationships since then, some more serious than others, but I have never had as strong a connection with anyone as I did with Stasia.

Five years later, at the height of allergy season, she e-mailed me to tell me that she was coming to a conference in Washington, DC, where I now live. She asked if she could stay at my apartment one night. She admitted that it might seem like a strange request because we hadn't spoken in so long.

Every year, I am surprised at how miserable my allergies can make me. Going into spring, I have a vague recollection of how debilitating my allergies are, but I never believe they are really that bad—until they are. Maybe my tendency to forget or downplay pain and unhappiness is a defense mechanism. Maybe the best way for me to keep moving forward is to expunge any known allergies from my life.

But a cut heals from within. I didn't react negatively to Stasia's e-mail, which made me think that in order to recognize how much I had healed, maybe I had to force myself to examine my scars and relive the pain.

So I told Stasia that she could stay with me, but I was worried about exposing myself again to this allergy. I did not want to lose control again. I did not want to remember how much I loved her. How much and how deeply she hurt me. How I reacted so violently when I lost her. How all of this put together still makes me very sad sometimes. How this lingering sadness makes me in turn feel a little pathetic. Will I ever outgrow this allergy? Should I even want to? Will bringing the pain to the surface again finally bring me the relief I seek?

I don't know what I was saying—some irrelevant story, most likely—when I looked across the table and saw her crying. Why are you crying?

She said she was sorry. I'm so sorry, she kept repeating. For hurting you. For leaving. For not being strong enough to stay.

Then she asked for my forgiveness. I never thought I would hear those words, spoken so plainly and with such obvious pain.

Of course I forgive you. I had forgiven her a long time ago. I had to. I wanted to.

I miss you, she said. I didn't know what to say. Years ago, this was all I wanted to hear.

She said that she remembers when I made the quilt that is still on my bed, remembers when I painted the pictures that are still on my walls. She remembers. She remembers.

You even smell the same, she said.

But I am not the same. When we met, I was 18. When she left, I was 24. I cried as her father moved her out of our apartment, cried when he wouldn't let me help her move her boxes. Even my fingerprints weren't allowed on the cardboard that enclosed our memories. I didn't understand what was happening, why it was happening.

But I am not the same. I am 31 now. I have had seven years of healing. Through this conversation, she was removing some of the stitches I had successfully sewn around my heart.

The next day, I hailed a cab and helped her put her bags in the trunk. As the taxi pulled away, I was momentarily transported to that first night without her. Alone in a half-empty apartment, those first hours were excruciating.

But I am not the same. My apartment, my life, and my heart are not empty anymore. Still, as I watched her leave, I started to cry. Passersby stared. It didn't matter.

Then, I started walking. I didn't know where I was headed. It didn't matter. I have learned these roads. Whatever route I take, I will find my way home.

Every year, I pray that I will have outgrown my allergies. I've heard that this can happen if you build up enough resistance over time.

This year, finally, I am not disappointed.